Google Takeout - its not a food delivery service

Can you afford to lose your email?

Most consumers take for granted that email access in dependable and always available.  Most of these services live in the cloud and we need a reasonable internet/mobile connections to reach them. 

Hypothetical scenarios

Travelling abroad using a local SIM card - google doesn't recognize the number and for your security requires that you reauthenticate and validate your account. 

If you happen to visit China and the great firewall blocks you. You need to lookup a hotel reservation on email. 

What would you do if a scammer tried to hack your gmail or google account and you get locked out.  

Do you have a plan B ?

We should all look at having a backup of our data. Hopefully, we may never need it. 

Start with https://takeout.google.com/

Google Takeout

Login with your google credentials, if not already logged in and then select the services you use and want to export. You might be surprised how many are listed.

Click the Next button at the bottom. A notification email will be sent with a link when the archive is ready for download - it might take a few hours. Download and save the file or multiple files, if there is a larger data set. 

Definitely back this up to an external hard drive or your preferred backup location, preferably not on the same desktop/laptop. 

Accessing email offline

Use Mozilla Thunderbird or a third-party email application. The Google Takeout archive will contain a email archive with extension .MBOX. See the support page for additional help in setting this up. If you use folders(gmail calls them labels), select the individual folders, instead of the select all option to preserve the folder structure. 

Reference links

Google support help page - https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190